The boundaries between Heaven and Hell are easily traversed, but a person must be wholly remade if they choose to enter Heaven. The narrative itself is revealed to be a dream, and it is this characteristic that makes it all the more real. Heaven is shown over the course of the narrative to be the result of a choice freely offered to humankind to make. The narrator and his traveling companions on the bus ride find that they are ghosts, imperfect shadows against this country of impermeable beauty. The narrative develops from the narrator taking a bus ride up and out of a grey and dank city away to the countryside he finds himself within the earliest parts of Heaven upon getting off the bus, a land of intense beauty and perfection. Lewis undertakes the task of redefining the relationship between Heaven and Hell for the purpose of dispelling the belief that “mere development or adjustment or refinement will somehow turn evil into good without our being called on for a final and total rejection of anything we should like to retain” (Lewis Preface). Lewis’ work entitled The Great Divorce is an allegory of the way that Lewis himself views Heaven and Hell. Lewis’ The Great Divorce: The Nature of Heaven and HellĬ.S.
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